McGovern Pleased With Showing At Combine

By Steve Bennett, Staff WriterMarch 2, 2019

The initial numbers are in, and by the time Lake-Lehman grad Connor McGovern was on his way to the airport Friday afternoon to catch a flight back to Pensacola, Florida, the offensive guard was pretty pleased with his performance over the course of the last four days at the NFL combine.

One of 57 offensive linemen invited to the annual event where NFL draft hopefuls are reviewed, interviewed and paraded around in front of NFL scouts and front office personnel to evaluate and analyze, McGovern felt pretty good about his body of work.

“It really wasn’t too bad,” said McGovern, who played three years on the offensive line for the Nittany Lions and declared for the NFL draft after Penn State’s bowl game on Jan. 1, the end of his junior season. “It was very hectic. It was a great opportunity and I was fortunate to be there. It was a lot of fun; it was non-stop for four days.”

He said he was up from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Wednesday. He had 17 formal interviews with NFL teams and met with others informally, though he was not at liberty to divulge which teams he interviewed with.

Along with the getting-to-know-one-another portion of the interviews, McGovern said he did a lot of boardwork where teams would draw up plays and he would have to diagram. Film from some of his games at Penn State were also evaluated.

“It was all different kinds of things,” McGovern said. “They put me on the board and asked me how I recognized defenses and talked about plays I ran at Penn State and what I was doing on certain plays. They told me what I could have done better, and they talked about my good plays. Some teams showed their offense to me and I had to learn their schemes and teach them back to them. I think I knocked it out of the park. Everyone was impressed with my boardwork.”

As for his measurables, McGovern checked in at 6-foot-5, 308 pounds, approximately 15 pounds down from his playing weight at Penn State. His arms measured 34 1/8”, while his hands measured 9 7/8”. He finished with 28 reps on the bench press, 112.0 inches in the broad jump, ran the 3-cone drill in 7.66 seconds and turned in a time of 4.57 seconds in the 20-yard shuttle. All numbers that ranked him within the top 10 of the offensive linemen.

McGovern said he will continue to train in Pensacola, and return to Penn State on March 15. He will participate in Penn State’s Pro Day, scheduled for March 19.

“I think I did very well,” McGovern said. “So far, I have been getting positive feedback. I had four hours of sleep before I did the bench press. I think when I was my fatter self I could have been in the low 30s no problem with the bench press. Dropping about 15 pounds I got to 28. This was a great experience. There were a lot of meetings. All the free time you were supposed to have you were talking to teams.”